From what I understand, the biggest obstacle right now is very limited toolset that he have available in order to create fully free / properly licensed content.

We can't use Bethesda's Construction Set as far as I am aware, as it's licensing prevents content being released under Creative Commons or something like that.

I would gladly put some of my free time towards helping develop this thing, but please someone make a list of specific tools that can / should be used for this. Textures and audio can be made / edited with a wide variety of tools, no need to list all of those, but FOSS tools that work with NIF files and other things that are required to make .esp / .esm files, that is something that we could use listed here.

I'd be willing to actually make content for an example suite but at current point modding OpenMW is a pain, there's no fine placement for objects within the editor, making internal architecture basically impossible, lest you were working on some kind of sequel to Psychonauts, there are no tools for creating or even importing acustom world terrain. you still need to use legacy tools to get many tasks done, the tools themselves are prone to crashing, and my most hated, the complete lack of a workable model format. .nif is painful to use especially as someone who uses blender due to the blender plugin only supporting ultra legacy 2.4, further worsened with the dawn of 2.8, the requirement to use niftools to set parameters for models so that they work in the engine, and also the fact that texture are set in the container itself, unlike Skyrim where you choose your textures in the actual editor, apart from .nif there is osgt, which is easier to export but lacks rigging/weighting, and an animation format so you can only do statics. That said, I'm not blaming anyone I understand that this is a project that people give their free time to work on but without adequate tools I can only sit outside and watch.

That annoyance aside the combat in Morrowind is bad, so I don't really get why the example suite is combat orientated, I had my own idea something with the proper tools I could implement myself. The base idea is a murder mystery with a new england setting where you have to find out who killed the owner of a country manor by asking questions, observing activities, solving puzzles and navigating the grounds of the manor, it's all about setting realistic goals and building a showcase that uses features that the OpenMW engine supports (having players find locations based on distant terrain features) and playing things to the strengths of the base Morrowind gameplay. I wouldn't use multiplayer simply because it works far better when things are expansive, and I wouldn't really put "example suite" and "expansive" side by side.

I like your idea of a murder mystery. I initially had a Lovecraftian-like mystery in mind, where you basically gather clues and discover stuff in a similar fashion as to what you described. I'm still weighing the different options on what to do.

Ideally, the mansion thing would be the first thing that is made and initially the core game. But after that, you can leave the mansion to discover an expanded world that the mansion mystery was just a long well-designed side quest of.

Reminds me of my original Island idea with someone that was marooned and had to looking for things to remember bits of their past. Still possible along with the idea of a Ravenloft like castle/town/port.

I was thinking Lovecraftian mystery, hence the new england setting. The Lovecraft setting appears to be free so it would be compatible with this project, it also has a pre established fanbase, and lovecraft games are few and far between, so we could use that to OpenMWs advantage. The main part of what I set forth is that it's quite lean, for the most part it's a quest mod with custom assets, of course all assets are custom so it's a bit more but we would need new assets for any example suite anyway. The basic game is also expandable, although the obvious limitation that you start as some kind of detective in what would ideally be a free setting, you could however have a system that allows you to choose multiple starting points in a pulp magazine sort of way. Lysol is right, sort of, it's just an example suite it's only real goal is that it shows of the features that the engine has, but a good mystery would do wonders for the OpenMW. Psi's idea is good too, it's lean, and a finished project is something OpenMW could use, both as a way to show off the engine, and for morale.